Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · CHAPTER 1 ·
Tokugawa shogunate and sakoku
Chapter 1 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000: “The Closed Country”
After Sekigahara in 1600 the Tokugawa shogunate gave Japan some 250 years without civil war, ruling a quarter of the country directly and binding about 260 daimyo through alternate attendance. Peace brought growth and a national market, while the Treaty of Nanking of 1842, imposed on China by Britain, showed the danger outside.
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The map above is the world of Japan, August 1842 — Nanking: five Chinese ports opened.
Part of IB History: Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The central question of this whole atlas is why some attempts to remake a state succeed while others fail, and who pays the price of the change. It follows two dramatic attempts, Japan after 1868 and the Soviet Union after 1985, and both begin with an old order that looked secure. In Japan that order was the Tokugawa shogunate, the military government founded after the battle of Sekigahara in 1600. The shogun was a hereditary general who ruled in the name of an emperor kept powerless in Kyoto, much as a military strongman might govern behind a figurehead king, and he governed about a quarter of the country directly. The rest belonged to some 260 lords called daimyo, each running his own domain (han) with its own samurai (hereditary warriors who also staffed every office, like a closed caste of soldier-officials), taxes and courts, much as the states of a loose federation keep their own governments under a distant centre. Because most of Japan’s soldiers and taxes belonged to the lords, the shogun could stop them uniting against him but had no means of his own to defend the whole country.
The patchwork of 1840 on the map shows an order that kept the peace by watching and draining the lords. Charcoal marks the shogun’s lands and the houses loyal to him in the centre, and grey-tan marks the “outer” lords, old enemies kept on the rim in Kyushu, western Honshu and the north. It lasted 250 years because alternate attendance made each daimyo live every other year in Edo, the shogun’s capital and today’s Tokyo, and leave his family there, a rule that worked like a permanent exchange of hostages. Contact with the outside world passed through a few guarded gates, above all the Dutch trading post on Dejima. The price of stability was a hidden weakness, because Japan had no national army and no national tax. When news arrived that Britain had beaten China and opened its ports, the blue dots now on China’s coast, Japan’s rulers grasped that an order built to stop Japanese fighting one another had nothing built to defend Japan.
The full story
The Tokugawa order was designed to make another civil war impossible, and the map shows how it did so. After his victory at Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu became shogun in 1603, a hereditary general ruling behind a powerless emperor, much like a strongman behind a figurehead king, and he redistributed the land. His own house and the fudai lords, families who had served the Tokugawa before 1600 like a ruler’s trusted inner circle, took the strategic centre around Edo, Kyoto and Osaka, all in charcoal. The lords who had fought him or joined him late, the tozama or “outer” lords such as the Shimazu of Satsuma and the Mōri of Chōshū, kept large domains on the edges, in grey-tan, but were shut out of national office. Alternate attendance, the rule from 1635 that each lord live every other year in Edo, the shogun’s capital and today’s Tokyo, then tied the lords to the centre, because the processions and a permanent mansion swallowed much of each domain’s income. The result was 250 years without civil war, bought by watching the lords and leaving the government of most Japanese to them.
Peace brought growth, and the growth slowly strained the order that produced it. The population reached about 30 million, and a national market grew along the processions’ roads and shipping routes. Osaka’s Dōjima rice exchange, licensed in 1730, traded promises of rice not yet harvested, much as a futures market does. Society’s official ranking placed the samurai, hereditary warriors who also staffed every office like a closed caste of soldier-officials, about 6% of the people, first and merchants last. Because samurai were paid fixed salaries in rice, they borrowed from merchants whenever rice prices fell, and many domains sank into debt. In the Tenmei famine of the 1780s, which exposed the limits of a divided state, Japan’s population fell by more than 900,000, and in 1837 a former Osaka official, Ōshio Heihachirō, led a rising that burned a fifth or more of the city. By the 1840s the order was calm at the top and strained underneath, the condition in which an outside shock does the most damage.
Japan’s famous “closure” worked as a filter, and it served the shogunate well until the world changed. Edicts of the 1630s banned Christianity, forbade Japanese to go abroad and restricted European trade to the Dutch, confined to the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour. Trade with Korea, the Ryukyu kingdom (today’s Okinawa) and the Ainu, the native people of Hokkaido, passed through three loyal domains, so the shogunate controlled what entered. Scholars of “Dutch learning” read Dejima’s books on anatomy and artillery, so the news of the Opium War of 1839–42 alarmed them. British steamships had defeated the largest state in Asia, and the Treaty of Nanking gave Britain Hong Kong and opened five Chinese ports. The shogunate softened its order to fire on foreign ships in 1842, yet it built no navy and raised no national tax. Its leaders saw the danger and could not meet it, because their system gave them no means of doing so.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
A compound state: how historians describe Tokugawa rule
Historians have long argued about what kind of state Tokugawa Japan was, and the answer shapes how we explain its fall. Older accounts called it a centralised “feudal absolutism” because the shogun could move, reward or abolish domains at will. Conrad Totman’s studies of the shogunate stressed instead how little it controlled directly: its own lands, about four million koku of assessed rice yield (a koku is roughly what one person eats in a year), plus some 2.6 million held by its bannermen, came to about a quarter of a national total near 30 million. Mark Ravina calls the system a “compound state”, in which domains issued their own paper money, ran their own industries and even conducted their own foreign trade, as Satsuma did through Ryukyu. Both views are true at once. The shogunate was strong enough to prevent war among the lords and too weak to tax or arm the country as a whole. That double character explains why the order was both long-lived and suddenly brittle once a threat arrived that only a national state could meet.
Growth inside a frozen hierarchy
Economic historians disagree about whether late Tokugawa Japan was stagnating or quietly modernising, and the evidence supports a mixed answer. Thomas C. Smith showed that villages turned to commercial crops, rural spinning and by-employments, so that much growth happened in the countryside beyond the reach of samurai tax collectors. Population, however, barely grew after about 1720, which some scholars read as a sign of poverty and infanticide and others, such as Susan Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, as households choosing smaller families to protect living standards. Schooling spread through thousands of private terakoya schools: Ronald Dore estimated that by the 1860s roughly 40% of boys and 10% of girls received some formal education, though Richard Rubinger’s later work on signatures and village records shows wide gaps between town and country. The strain fell on the samurai and the domains, whose fixed rice incomes could not keep up with a money economy. The Meiji state would inherit both the assets and the debts, and the assets turned out to matter more.
Was Japan really closed?
Historians now doubt that Japan was ever as closed as its famous label suggests, and the label itself came late: the word sakoku, “closed country”, was coined in 1801 by the translator Shizuki Tadao while rendering a European book into Japanese. Ronald Toby’s research changed the picture by showing that the shogunate ran an active foreign policy through “four gates”: Nagasaki for the Dutch and Chinese, Tsushima for Korea, Satsuma for Ryukyu and Matsumae for the Ainu. Korean embassies came to Japan twelve times, and Ryukyuan missions paraded through the capital, which let the shogun display himself as the centre of a small international order of his own. Information also flowed in: every year the Dutch submitted a written news report, and after 1840 these reports described the war in China in detail. In 1825 the Mito scholar Aizawa Seishisai’s New Theses had already argued that only a nation united around the emperor could resist the West. Closure therefore gave Japan’s rulers knowledge without power, a combination that would make the crisis of 1853 both understood and unmanageable.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Sekigahara settled who ruled and left the losers in place. Ieyasu won in 1600 but could not destroy every enemy, so he cut their lands and left them armed on the edges of the country. The Mōri of Chōshū lost most of their eight provinces and kept two; the Shimazu of Satsuma kept their whole domain far to the south-west. These outer lords nursed their grievances for 250 years, and their remoteness gave them room to build armies and treasuries the shogunate could not inspect. The settlement that made peace in 1600 also placed the future rebels exactly where they would be hardest to control.
Alternate attendance bought loyalty by draining the lords. From 1635 every daimyo spent alternate years in Edo with a large retinue and kept his wife and heir there permanently. The processions and mansions consumed a large share of domain revenue, so few lords could afford to rebel. The same rule built highways, inns and a national market, and it made Edo one of the largest cities in the world. The system worked as a political brake, yet it pushed the domains into debt to the merchants and left them with little money for defence when the need arrived.
A divided state had no national army or tax. The shogun taxed only his own lands, and each daimyo kept his own samurai and his own rice tax. That arrangement suited a country whose main danger was internal war. Against a foreign navy it was close to useless, because no one could raise money from the whole country or command all its soldiers. When the reformer Mizuno Tadakuni tried to bring the land around Edo and Osaka under direct shogunal control in 1843, the lords and bannermen affected forced him out within months. The shogunate could not even reorganise its own heartland.
Controlled contact gave knowledge without power. Dejima, the Dutch news reports and the scholars of Dutch learning kept Japan’s elite unusually well informed about Western science and Western wars. By the 1840s officials knew how Britain had beaten China and what steam warships could do. Knowledge alone could not build a navy, however, because the money and the soldiers belonged to the domains. The result was a ruling class that understood its danger earlier than most of Asia and still lacked the machinery to act on what it understood.
THE TURNING POINT
The Treaty of Nanking, 29 August 1842. China’s defeat is the hinge of this chapter because it turned an abstract danger into a concrete precedent. Japan’s rulers had read about Western power for decades; now they watched the region’s greatest state lose a war, pay 21 million silver dollars, hand over Hong Kong and open five ports to British merchants, who a year later won the right to be tried under their own law. Already alarmed by reports of British victories, the shogunate cancelled its 1825 order to fire on foreign ships in the same weeks, which was a sensible step and also an admission that it could not fight. The blue dots that appear on China’s coast are a preview of what Japan’s own map would look like within twenty years.
What it changed
Caution replaced preparation. After 1842 the shogunate chose to avoid provocation, offering fuel and water to foreign ships, and it rejected a Dutch royal letter of 1844 urging it to open the country on its own terms. Coastal batteries were built in places, but no navy and no national tax followed. When Perry arrived in 1853, the government faced him with the same divided machinery it had in 1842.
An emperor-centred nationalism was already taking shape. Scholars of the Mito school, above all Aizawa Seishisai, argued that Japan needed spiritual unity around the emperor to resist the West, and they coined the slogan of “revering the emperor and expelling the barbarians”. The idea was meant to strengthen the shogunate, yet it placed loyalty to the emperor above loyalty to the shogun. Within twenty years it would be turned against the house it was written to defend.
The rim domains reformed their finances first. While the shogunate’s reforms stalled, the two great outer domains repaired their treasuries in the 1830s and 1840s. Satsuma’s Zusho Hirosato cleared enormous debts partly through a sugar monopoly worked by islanders in Amami and partly through the trade it ran through Ryukyu, and Chōshū’s Murata Seifū rebuilt its finances and trade. Twenty years later these were the domains that could afford Western ships and rifles, which is why the revolution came from the edge of the map.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Tokugawa order already collapsing before 1853, or did the outside world break a system that still worked?
The case for internal collapse rests on real evidence: domains and samurai sank into debt, peasant protests grew more frequent after 1750, famines killed hundreds of thousands, and Ōshio’s rising showed discontent inside the ruling class itself. Marxist historians in Japan long argued that feudalism was decaying from within. The case for resilience is also strong, because no lord challenged the shogun for 250 years, the economy grew, and the order survived every famine and protest it faced. Most historians, including Marius Jansen and Conrad Totman, now treat the internal strains as the cause of vulnerability and the foreign threat as the trigger. The strains decided how badly the system would handle a shock, and the shock decided when it would have to. The same question returns in this atlas’s second half, where historians argue whether the Soviet system was dying in 1985 or was killed by the attempt to reform it. The transferable lesson is that old orders rarely fall from internal weakness alone, yet internal weakness determines how hard they fall when pressure arrives from outside.
An interesting fact
One of the best European descriptions of Tokugawa Japan came from a German doctor working for the Dutch, Engelbert Kaempfer, who travelled with the Dutch mission to Edo in 1691 and 1692. At the shogun Tsunayoshi’s court he and his Dutch colleagues were ordered to walk, dance, jump, sing, play the drunkard and speak broken Japanese while the shogun and his ladies watched from behind a lattice; Kaempfer added a German love song to his dance. His posthumous History of Japan (1727) remained Europe’s fullest account of the country for more than a century, and it showed readers a ruler who could make foreign envoys perform for him at will.
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